LIMA Presents: New Work - Kent Chan, Ghita Skali, Frederique Pisuisse and Eoghan Ryan

Wednesday, 28 September, 2022
Start: 19.30 
LAB111, Arie Biemondstraat 111, Amsterdam
Entrance: € 7,50 / Students € 5,- / Free with Cineville
Language: English
Facebook event // Click here for tickets

LIMA is proud to present new works by Kent Chan, Ghita Skali, Frederique Pisuisse and Eoghan Ryan! Artists Kent Chan, Frederique Pisuisse and Eoghan Ryan will be present to talk about their in a Q&A  which will open up to questions from the audience!

To celebrate the 2022 fall season opening, we also present an exclusive preview of the brand-new installation Forming Folds by Zeno van den Broek. Afterwards, there is an opportunity to catch up at LAB111’s bar in attendance of the curator and the artists.

Forming Folds is co-produced by LIMA. Supported by Mondriaan Fund and StimuleringsFonds.

The works presented at The LIMA Collection: New Work are selected by curator Manique Hendricks and are all connected to an overarching theme of bodies and borders. Frederique Pisuisse creates a body-mind seperation experience in I’m Just Lying There by warping time and stretching the body, telling the story of the female body being subjected to the male gaze. In The Invaders, Ghita Skali humorously addresses the absurdity of extreme right discourses by reversing migration flows as Europeans struggle to get to the Global South. Kent Chan examines the contexts, politics and proliferation of different aesthetics of heat in Heat Waves. pre- and post-Brexit ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland are visualized as repetitive political theater in Eoghan Ryan’s A SOD State, addressing binary contradictions of class, faith, identities and borders. 

This event is made possible by the generous support of the AFK. 

Frederique Pisuisse - I’m Just Lying There, 2022, 19'45''
I’m Just Lying There is a ficto-memoir about Frederique Pisuisse’s teenage relationship with her first boyfriend, who was 22 years older than her at that time. Through poems and pop songs, the film brings back memories of their dates: having dinner at a restaurant for the first time without parents, or being picked up from her birthday in his Mercedes. The coming of age film looks at the shaping experiences in which the female body is subjected to the male gaze for the first time and becomes an object of desire. The protagonist, who is 14 years old at the time of their affair, is pulled towards the sensual experiences of being with this man, and simultaneously feels the danger of these experiences. There’s a sense of dissolution of the self. She uses herintellect to separate and watch over the body she owns, a detachment strategy, whereby the scene appears to us in birds-eye-view. The visuals, consisting entirely of an African snail family crawling over a naked body, allow the viewer to perceive the tactual sensations of memories.

Ghita Skali - The Invaders (2021) 9'51''
The Invaders by Ghita Skali, protagonist Cheikha Houria - a popular singer and dancer - is alarmed to find out white Europeans are invading her country in a camembert-shaped UFO. Statements like “We have to get used to them and to accept them in our society” echo the language that is often used to talk about immigrants that arrive from outside of Europe. During the first lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, many Europeans were struggling to get back to Europe while stranded on their vacation locations all over the world. Inspired by this reverse of immigration and travel streams, Skali humoristicly interweaves fact with fiction and pop culture with the colonial past of France and Morocco.

The Invaders is originally an American science-fiction televison series from the 1970s about aliens invading earth. In the 1990s the French humorists Les Inconnus made a remake of this TV show where the invaders were migrants living in France. Transforming the aliens into Arab and Asian migrants is a cynical gesture which is also showing the absurdity of the extreme right discourses. The Invaders becomes a remake of this remake where the world went upside down and the attraction from the Global South to Europe is reversed.

Eoghan Ryan, A SOD State, 22'03''
‘Sod’ or turf is wet fertile ground. It is also slang British for a person that is difficult or causes problems and ‘sod all’ means ‘absolutely nothing’. A SOD State by Eoghan Ryan posits pre- and post-Brexit 'troubles' in Northern Ireland as repetitive political theatre, in which an inner demon performs binary contradictions of class, faith, identities, and borders; private, public, and political. Acts of terror, depictions of violence and the depth of hatred between people are central to the work. What can be traced back to religion, authority and politics, and how do they intermingle? What scars do they leave? In this work, Ryan mixes images from news reports of burning police vehicles, riots, people throwing stones and the sound of howling sires with interviews and an animated puppet wearing a pig mask. By doing so, he reflects on the ways in which humans have been and are protesting and questioning authoritarian politics - while at the same time publicly fighting each other and the state. The work shows the influence that mass media have when it comes to depicting violence and clashes between different groups of people.

Kent Chan, Heat Waves, 2022. 21’20”
Comprising edited sequences of historical and contemporary imagery and videos, both filmed and found footage from traditional as well as social media, Heat Waves weaves together often contradictory narratives around the tropics. It depicts an abundant, yet poor paradise with energetic though lazy inhabitants. Images of palm trees are alternated with paintings by Gauguin, footage of hurricane and tropical storms and its survivors together with news items, weather reports and covers of jungle comics. In this video, Kent Chan examines the contexts, politics, and proliferation of different aesthetics of heat. Aesthetics that stems from regions of the globe coloured by their solar relations bestowing heat in abundance. Aesthetics that are often generalised - charge with vibrancy, vitality, and visual complexity - and which are increasingly mined at a time when the earth is simultaneously warming.

Heat Waves is made possible by the kind support of National Arts Council of Singapore